TEDxStriversrow

Speakers

Speakers may not be confirmed. Check the event website for the latest lineup.

• Beth Fisher-Yoshida

  Author, Negotiation Expert, Professor

  Dr. Beth Fisher-Yoshida is Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University, Program Director of its M.S. in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution, CEO of Fisher Yoshida International, and author of New Story, New Power: A Woman's Guide to Negotiation. She has advised Fortune 100 companies, the United Nations, and governments worldwide. Her talk tackles the negotiation most training ignores: the one where you can't afford to lose the person — the boss you report to on Monday, the client who anchors next year's revenue. Drawing on interviews with 30 accomplished women, Beth reveals the four pressures that derail even prepared negotiators — fear of loss, the likeability trap, the credibility gap, and collapse under pressure — and the pattern beneath them all: women don't lose negotiations at the prep. They lose them in the room. Her R.I.S.E. Framework gives the audience language, a diagnostic, and a repeatable way to hold the edge — without losing themselves, or the relationship.

• Kalpashree Gupta

  Founder & CEO, Knekxt Group

  Kalpa is a promotion systems strategist for women in product — and the person who tells high-performing women what no one else will: you were handed the wrong map. A former product leader at American Express and Zelle, she has sat inside the rooms where promotion decisions actually get made — and built the A.P.C. Framework™ (Ambiguity, Power, Constraints) on primary research with 27 senior women in product, all doing everything right, and still waiting. Her thesis: being stuck is not a confidence gap. It's a literacy gap. In this talk, her audience will learn to read the hidden operating system behind every promotion — why the stated criteria are never the real criteria, why a sponsor matters more than a mentor, and why, in an AI-disrupted landscape, heads-down execution is the most exposed position in the building. They'll leave with a second map: systems literacy no restructure, manager change, or disruption can take from them.

• Kevin Williams

  Former Pharma Executive, Physician, Executive Coach

  Kevin Williams spent 20 years in pharmaceutical leadership watching brilliant people disappear in rooms that should have been watching them. They weren't failing. They were doing a second job no one had named: deciding, in real time, which edition of themselves the room would tolerate. When he left corporate life, he went to find out what that job had cost. He has since interviewed 45 senior leaders—vice presidents, general counsels, chief medical officers—asking one question: Where do you feel you cannot be yourself? Their answers became his framework on dimming: the four forms it takes and what it quietly costs high performers. Today he writes and advises leaders on strategic visibility. His mission is to hand high performers the playbook they were never given—so they stop disappearing, start deciding what each room gets to see, and then publish that playbook for the person coming behind them

• Kimberly Wilson Wetty

  Founder & CEO, KWW Inc. (Keep Wondering Why)

  Kimberly Wilson-Wetty spent three decades inside one of the most storied names in luxury travel: Valerie Wilson Travel, the agency her mother founded and built over forty years. As Co-President, she helped lead the family firm through its greatest growth — and then through the hardest conversation of all, when four family members gathered in her mother's apartment to decide the company's future. She has been at the seam between generations ever since: daughter of a founder, mother of a child who taught her that identity is not inherited but authored, and now a translator between the leaders who built high-touch businesses and the Gen Z and millennial clients and heirs reshaping them. Through her firm KWW Inc. and her OS shift™, she teaches family offices and luxury hospitality brands how to earn the next generation without abandoning the one that built them. She speaks on the conversation every founder-led company must eventually have.

• Lisa Niser

  Financial Wellness Educator I Speaker | Lisa Strauss Niser, E.A.

  Lisa Niser is a tax advisor who spends her days behind the facade — inside the tax returns, the cash flow and the actual balance sheets of people who look, from the outside, like they have it figured out. She trained at Ernst & Young, holds a master's in taxation from DePaul University, and advises seven-figure professionals, law firm partners and business owners. She is the creator of Intentional Wealth and the Three Lives Financial Framework, which asks three questions in order: what does it cost to be you today, what would protect you if everything changed, and what is still possible? Her work makes the case that money is a tool, not a scoreboard — that control begins with clarity rather than income, and that the most expensive thing a successful person can do is stay on autopilot. She lives and practices in Chicago.

• Margo Brenner

  Former Lawyer

  Margo Brenner began in law, where she was trained to ask whether a structure was sound — not whether a person was. Decades later, after eleven years in tech and a layoff she didn't choose, she turned that question on her own life. What she found wasn't a career problem. It was a belonging problem. She was standing at the peak of her professional life and had never been more alone — and every accomplished woman she talked to was privately blaming herself for the same thing. So she built a case. Across [30} research interviews with women in midlife, the pattern held: belonging had never been something these women built. It was a byproduct of career, marriage and active parenting — structures that expire, often all at once. When they go, belonging goes with them. Margo calls this "Disrupting Drift." Her work is teaching women to disrupt it — not by becoming different women, but by re-installing the structure the world stopped providing.

• Michael Lindsey

  Dean and Paulette Goddard Professor of Social Work, NYU

  Dr. Michael A. Lindsey is Dean and Paulette Goddard Professor of Social Work at NYU Silver School of Social Work, and one of the country's leading voices on child and adolescent mental health. His work asks a question America has been slow to confront: why are Black children dying by suicide at rising rates, and what will it take to reach them in time? He led the expert working group behind Ring the Alarm: The Crisis of Black Youth Suicide in America, the landmark report commissioned by the Congressional Black Caucus. He is principal investigator on multiple NIH studies, including a $5.8 million project bringing suicide screening and intervention into the emergency departments of Harlem and Kings County hospitals. Dr. Lindsey serves on the New York City Board of Health and the CDC's Community Preventive Services Task Force, and is President of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare. He holds degrees from Morehouse, Howard, and the University of Pittsburgh.

• Vicki Tull

  Residential Real Estate Agent, Ellingson Properties | Writer, Tender warrior

  For four years, Vicki Tull cared for her husband Lee through Alzheimer's — watching the relationship die before the person did, and somewhere in between, losing herself. What she rebuilt after became The Three Returns: a framework for coming back to your body, your people, and your name when a role that consumed you ends. Her talk is not only for caregivers. It's for anyone who has exited a role that once defined them — retirement, divorce, an empty nest — and heard the same quiet question: who am I now? Audiences leave with three things: a name for the guilt no one says out loud, a permission structure for wanting your own life again, and the understanding that belonging to yourself isn't something you wait to feel — it's something you rebuild, in acts as small as one minute. A writer of the "Tender Warrior" and community builder for caregivers finding their way back, Vicki tells this story the way she lived it: tenderly, and like a warrior.